Vampire Tears candles (set of 4)

How to Use It

Witchcraft & Folk Magick

• Banishing: carve the name of what you want gone down the shaft, burn the candle to the end and bury or bin the drips off your property.
• Ceromancy: stand the taper on a white plate and read the red runs once it is spent; a heavy flow down one side is read as the direction the work went.
• Release work: write what you are grieving or ending on paper, let the red wax drip onto it, then burn or bury the sealed paper.

Demonology & Black Magick

• Hexing: dress the candle with a hot or sour oil, set it on a photo or name-paper of the target and let the red wax drown the image.
• Blood offering in candle form: burned for spirits who are traditionally given red offerings, with the drips gathered and laid at the base of the shrine.

A Simple Working

• Choose one taper and set it in a holder on a white saucer.
• Write on a slip of paper the habit, person or influence you want out of your life.
• Sprinkle a pinch of sea salt over the paper and place it beneath the saucer.
• Light the candle and say plainly what is leaving and that it is not welcome back.
• Let the candle burn down completely, watching where the red runs heaviest.
• Gather the spent wax, salt and paper together and throw them away at a crossroads or in a bin away from home.

Pairs Well With

• Black salt: to ring the base of the candle in banishing work.
• Banishing oil: for dressing the shaft before lighting.
• A white ceramic plate: to catch the red drips clearly for reading.
• Dragon’s blood resin: for an incense that matches the red-on-black theme.

What You Receive

A set of 4 black taper candles with a red core that drips red as they burn, each 10 inches tall with a 3/4 inch base.

Origin & Lore

Vampire Tears candles are modern ritual tapers: a black outer layer poured over red wax, so the red melts through and streams down the shaft. They belong to the long practice of choosing candle colour for its meaning, with black for absorbing, ending and sending away, and red for blood, force and life.

Light one and within minutes the black candle begins to weep red. The trick is a coloured core under a black skin, but on a dark altar it looks like something alive.

The word vampire entered English in the early 1730s through newspaper accounts of the Arnold Paole case in Serbia, where Austrian army surgeons reported exhuming bodies found to be fresh and full of blood. Reading melted wax, known as ceromancy, is far older: wax was dripped into water and the shapes read for omens across Europe, a practice still kept up in Eastern European Christmas and New Year customs.